The nominees for the 82nd Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning, and the biggest surprise is that there really aren’t many surprises.
If you’ve been following film at all during the last year then you probably expected every single film that was nominated to be there.
Of course, this year marks the first time in several decades that the Academy has nominated 10 films for Best Picture instead of the traditional five. Those films are: “Avatar,” “The Hurt Locker,” “An Education,” “A Serious Man,” “Precious,” “District 9,” “Inglorious Basterds,” “Up” and “Up in the Air.”
As expected, expanding to a field of 10 has let in a few films that probably wouldn’t have made the cut, like “District 9” and “Up.” But this expansion also might cause a “Ralph Nader effect,” where a smaller film might siphon away votes from a bigger film, causing a potentially huge upset because no film receives a large majority of votes. It’s an interesting experiment and we’ll see how well it goes.
The Best Director category follows nicely with Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker,” Jason Reitman for “Up in the Air,” Lee Daniels for “Precious,” Quentin Tarantino for “Inglorious Basterds” and Mr. Moneybags James Cameron for—wait, what movie did he direct this year?
All joking aside, it wouldn’t be the Oscars if there weren’t snubs, but even the snubs this year feel a tad bit predictable.
The biggest “surprise” of the entire list of nominees is the fact that “Invictus,” Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela biopic, only received two nominations and they were both for acting. Eastwood must have said something mean about someone in the Academy’s mother, because after years of being a token Oscar nominee it seems like he’s fallen out of its good graces.
But even that isn’t shocking news. “Invictus” looked like standard Eastwood, and based on the fact that he was ignored last year for not one, but two films (“Gran Torino” and “Changeling”), perhaps his standard isn’t good enough anymore. Hopefully the four-time Oscar winning director takes this recent cold streak as evidence that he needs to do something a little bit more out of the box.
Other snubs include Sam Rockwell for his breathtaking performance in “Moon,” the Coen Brothers for Best Directors for “A Serious Man” and Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones,” which only received one nomination.
Again, no surprises there: Rockwell was great, but “Moon” just isn’t an Oscar film; “A Serious Man” was a Coen’s comedy and everyone knows comedies are routinely screwed by the Academy; and almost everyone has ignored “The Lovely Bones,” so why wouldn’t Academy voters?
The acting categories are a bit more interesting, though. Unlike last year where a few big name performers dominated in each category, this year the biggest names aren’t necessarily locks.
Take Best Actor, for example: George Clooney (“Up in the Air”), Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart”) and Morgan Freeman (“Invictus) have all been nominated several times, and both Clooney and Freeman have won Best Supporting Actor in the past. Yet they aren’t the ones generating genuine excitement.
Colin Firth (“A Single Man”) and Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”) are both nominated for their first Oscars and are receiving some pretty serious buzz. They might still be considered long shots, but stranger things have happened (cough, “Crash,” cough).
In the Best Actress category the story is similar. Both Helen Mirren (“The Last Station”) and Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia) have won Best Actress before, and Streep holds the all-time record for most nominations, with 16.
But Carey Mulligan (“An Education”), Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) and Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”) are all unexpected success stories and have a chance at being upsets.
Interestingly, with her nomination Bullock becomes one of the few actresses to get nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Raspberry (given for the worst movies of the year) in the same year for different films.
This year’s Best Supporting Actor category is also pretty exciting, and—to be perfectly honest—a bit strange. The nominees are Woody Harrelson (“The Messenger”), Matt Damon (“Invictus”), Christopher Plummer (“The Last Station”), Stanley Tucci (“The Lovely Bones”) and Christoph Waltz (“Inglorious Basterds”).
What makes this category surprising compared to other years is that, despite Harrelson having a previous nomination and Damon already having won an Oscar, none of these actors are quite the Oscar type. Also interesting is the fact that Waltz, who made his English-speaking debut in Tarantino’s WWII epic, is considered one of this year’s few shoo-ins.
The Supporting Actress category is also pretty solid with Penelope Cruz (“Nine”), Mo’nique (“Precious”), Maggie Gyllenhaal (“Crazy Heart”), Verga Farmiga (“Up in the Air”) and Anna Kendrick (“Up in the Air”) all receiving nominations.
Finally, Best Animated Film might be the overall strongest category as this year was a pretty great year for animation.
Of course, Pixar generally dominates this category and has won the award five times since 2001, including the last two years.
This year’s Pixar film “Up” is definitely considered by many to be one of their best, but it has some pretty impressive competition with “The Princess and the Frog,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Coraline” and “The Secret of Kells.”
It should be noted, however, that “Up” is the only Pixar film to also be nominated for Best Picture, and is only the second animated film after Disney’s 1991 classic “Beauty and the Beast” to ever receive a Best Picture nomination.
The 82nd Academy Awards will air Sunday, March 7 on ABC, with co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. For the full list of nominees visit www.Oscar.com.
Last year, The Eastern Echo went six for six with our Oscar predictions, so check back the week before the awards to see our picks for this year.